Recently links to a dubious interview on an even more doubtful internet news site found their way into my inbox. Under the guise of informed scholarship the interviewee claimed that all languages descended ultimately from Aramaic, and I see now that the interviewer, a certain Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis, is advocating the imposition of Aramaic throughout Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq and the elimination of the 'barabarism' of Arabic. This, he believes, will uproot terrorism.

Dr. Megalommatis is so prolific that his work appears not only in the American Chronicle (based in Beverly Hills), but also in the California Chronicle (based in Beverly Hills), the Los Angeles Chronicle (based in Beverly Hills), the Pennsylvania Chronicle (based in Beverly Hills), the World Sentinel (based in Beverly Hills). According to biographical blurb on these sites he supports Martin Bernal's radically leftist and pseudo-scholarly Black Athena, and yet also writes for the Conservative Voice, and advocates the annihilation of Iran by means of atomic bombs in a blog comment.

So just who is this guy, and what are all of these supposed news sources that publish his wisdom?

Well, it seems that those first four (if you haven't already guessed) are just mirrors of the same site, and that anyone can contribute.

And what's wrong with that? As a blogger I have to say openly and unapologetically, 'Nothing.'

Nothing aside from the fact that it's not a blog, but a site designed to look like a newspaper, and one that Google Alerts keeps sending to my inbox as though it is one. Their opinions page makes no distinction between obvious spam ads, vitriolic screeds that defy the supposed editorial oversight, hackish efforts at personal promotion, and viral postings that appear at dozens of other sites to promote social and political causes.

As for the good doctor, who is supposed to be 'the author of 12 books, dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of encyclopedia entries, and thousands of articles,' I can find no trace of him either in JSTOR or in WorldCat (both of which I can access through institutional privileges) unless he is, as he claims, the former Cosmas Megalommatis who has one book in WorldCat. Yet he claims in one of his own publications to be 'one of the Middle East's and Greece's foremost historians,' and has so impressive an academic CV one wonders how he ended up a technical writer and not a full professor of all things under the sun.

I don't know what to make of it, but I didn't trust the first story when it ended up in my inbox, and I'm even less confident now.